A month ago, our 5-year-old daughter started her final preschool year at a new school, one with a program for native speakers of German. She has one hour of German class each day, and the other week she came home with this cute rhyme:

Yesterday I took my now-almost-4-year-old daughter to the playground at the end of the street where I grew up and where my mom still lives. We’d been there before on a previous visit, it’s a nice little playground for younger kids, but this was the first time we went there and other kids (and moms) […]

Twitter is my friend for anything writing-related these days. But I also do a bit of bilingualism on the side, as several of my writer friends are expats and parents, too. This week I came across this wonderful website with really good advice for parents of bilingual or to-be-bilingual children: Raising bilingual children

Today I came across this article on a UK website: Languages – Gift of bilingualism is too often ‘squandered’ Some quotes: [Professor Joseph Lo Bianco, of the University of Melbourne] who advised the Australian government on its languages policy, said it was of “critical importance” that education systems across the world fostered a “multilingual mentality”, […]

A multilingual friend of mine whom I interviewed for this blog a while ago read my recent post asking Why not English? Here’s her reaction: Forget English, German is the tongue that we all wish to know, to emigrate to the country of jobs and money!!! (that’s what they say everyday on Spanish TV). But […]

Over the long weekend, we went to see friends in Germany whose son is the same age as our little girl. The two hit it off right away, but for the first day and a half our girl used the method of “if he doesn’t understand me, I must repeat and speak more loudly”. “Viens, […]

We just spent a long weekend with monolingual German friends who have a son almost exactly our girl’s age. (More on the effects on that on our little girl’s bilingualism later.) These friends are clearly unfamiliar with the concept of bilingual families, but the question they asked proved interesting. It was fairly simple: Why German, […]

  She called me mommy last night! I apologise for the (possibly misleading) German title of this post, but the sentence resonates with me in my mother tongue more than it does in its English translation. Funny, that. But let’s get back to the event itself: After a couple of weeks during which I’ve heard […]

As a postscriptum to my post of almost a year ago (Jan. 4, 2010), here is another article on newborn babies crying differently according to their mother tongue – or at least the language they heard while in their mother’s womb: BBC article This article on the BBC wesite contains a sound sample where the […]

A cousin of mine, who grew up in the US with her mother speaking German, spent a school year with her grandparents in Germany, going to German junior high school (she was 10). She’s now perfectly bilingual. One of my friends was born of French parents in Paris but raised in the US, her mother […]